Constructor: Sam Buchbinder and Brad Wilber
Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Tuesday)
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THEME: LET'S PUT A PIN IN IT (38A: Suggestion to defer discussion ... and what might be said of 17-, 25-, 46- and 60-Across) — places where one might put a "pin" (of one kind or another):
Theme answers:
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The fill in this one is pretty plain, so everything is really riding on that revealer, and thankfully it delivers. It's one of those idioms I've never used and am only aware of from representations of business or other types of meetings on television or in the movies. Maybe I've heard it a jillion times at meetings I've been in and, like most business-speak, I've tuned it out. Is putting a pin in "it" different from tabling "it"? Nope, "Table" means "postpone consideration of," so I guess someone somewhere just decided the idiom needed livening up. Anyway, it should be a familiar enough expression to most people, and the set of themers covers the "pin" bases very nicely, with VOODOO DOLL expressing the theme most literally or precisely, and the meaning of "pin" getting slightly, uh, bendier from there on: safety pin, bowling pin, PIN number, which is by far my favorite context for "pin" here, mostly because I envisioned the literalists going nuts over the phrase ATM MACHINE ("redundant!," they cried, "the 'M' already stands for 'machine'!"), without realizing that the brilliance of ATM MACHINE as a famously redundant expression here is that the PIN that is relevant here is involved in *yet another* famously redundant expression, namely PIN NUMBER ("redun-... [chokes, sputters] ... -dant! The 'N' .... the ... 'N'!"). So either you're double-mad or you see it as a kind of redundancy joke. I choose option B.
More things:
Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Tuesday)
Theme answers:
- VOODOO DOLL (17A: Figure in many hexes)
- CLOTH DIAPER (25A: Alternative to Huggies or Luvs)
- BOWLING LANE (46A: Place for splits and spares)
- ATM MACHINE (60A: $$$ dispenser)
I Lost It at the Movies is a 1965 book that serves as a compendium of movie reviews written by Pauline Kael, later a film critic from The New Yorker, from 1954 to 1965. The book was published prior to Kael's long stint at The New Yorker; as a result, the pieces in the book are culled from radio broadcasts that she did while she was at KPFA, as well as numerous periodicals, including Moviegoer, the Massachusetts Review, Sight and Sound, Film Culture, Film Quarterly and Partisan Review. It contains her negative review of the then widely acclaimed West Side Story, glowing reviews of other movies such as The Golden Coach and Seven Samurai, as well as longer polemical essays such as her largely negative critical responses to Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film and Andrew Sarris's Film Culture essay Notes on the Auteur Theory, 1962. The book was a bestseller upon its first release, and is now published by Marion Boyars Publishers.Kael's first book is characterized by an approach where she would often quote contemporary critics such as Bosley Crowther and Dwight Macdonald as a springboard to debunk their assertions while advancing her own ideas. This approach was later abandoned in her subsequent reviews, but is notably referred to in Macdonald's book, Dwight Macdonald On Movies (1969).
When an interviewer asked her in later years as to what she had "lost", as indicated in the title, Kael averred: "There are so many kinds of innocence to be lost at the movies." It is the first in a series of titles of books that would have a deliberately erotic connotation, typifying the sensual relation Kael perceived herself as having with the movies, as opposed to the theoretical bent that some among her colleagues had. (wikipedia)
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Lots of 3s 4s and 5s today so not much room to get any pizazz into the grid. POOL PARTY sounds fun right about now, but I'm gonna need more than just one ONION RING if we're gonna really get things hopping. I don't love I LOST as fill, but I love the clue. It's a genuinely famous collection of reviews, and I like the New York(er)-ness of the answer. There are good and bad ways for the NYTXW to be obsessed with its home city. This is a good way (Kael wrote for The New Yorker for decades, those decades being primarily the '70s and '80s). There were one too many crossreference clues in this puzzle for my taste, which is to say there were two. PIE / PAN I didn't mind, as those answers intersect, so I didn't have to go looking all over hell and gone to find the other part. The two parts of ICE / CUBE are also relatively close to each other, but having had one crossreference already by the time I got there, I was full. Could've been worse. Could've gone with ARM / REST for the crossreference trifecta. Speaking of ARM, feels like ART or ARC would be better there, which is to say I would never go with a SIM (narrow, old video game-related singular suitable only for xword emergencies, IMHO), when I could get an ordinary word like SIT or SIC in there and clue it All Kinds of Ways. Ordinary words with broad cluing potential > narrowly specific proper nouns if those narrowly specific proper nouns are, themselves, crosswordese of a sort. The reason I'm spending time on this largely unimportant corner is that the SIM clue had "Member of ... family" in it, and so having SI-, I wrote in SIS (and could just as easily have written in SIB). Not real thrilled about cluing ambiguity around an answer that should have, and could have easily, been a different answer.
- 2D: $$$ (MOOLA)— wrote in MONEY. I like that "$$$" appears in this grid twice (see the ATM MACHINE clue). I feel like the puzzle is low-key winking at us a bunch, and today I somehow don't mind.
- 9D: Clumsy (MALADROIT)— pretty high-falutin' word for a Tuesday. Had the MAL- and still needed a bunch of crosses to remember that MALADROIT (a fine word, actually) existed.
- 37D: Wreck room? (STY)— didn't really get this at all ("the pigs just live there ... it's not a 'wreck' to them!") until I realized that STY here is just a metaphor for a messy room, of course.
- 47D: Shade of some turning leaves (OCHER)— my least favorite fall color, first because it just sounds / looks bad ... like a disease that okra would have ... and second because I can never spell it confidently, probably because it can be spelled two ways: OCHRE / OCHER. The OCHRE spelling is preferred in Britain and other non-US places, but while the NYTXW indicates Britishness for many -RE-spelled words (LITRE, for instance), it never does so for OCHRE, so you just have to guess.